Jingo All the Way?

From the Kroger store just outside Cincinnati to the
Travel-Centers of America truck stops in Texas, T-shirts emblazoned
with â€œGod Bless Americaâ€? and â€œUnited We
Standâ€? greet consumers. Nearly every newscast brands the
events since Sept. 11 as something like â€œAmerica Strikes
Backâ€? or â€œAmerica's New War.â€?

Literally before the smoke had cleared, slick fliers graced
local Citibank branches, bearing the image of Uncle Sam from the
famous World War I recruiting poster, saying he wanted
â€œYOUâ€? to buy stocks on the coming Monday. Past our
patriotic tschatchkes, we have been urged back into â€œthe
economyâ€? by commercial-minded cadres from Federal Reserve
chair Alan Greenspan to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, whose
office is distributing 15,000 posters featuring an American flag
with shopping bag handles.

More recently, a consortium of designers, accompanied by dutiful
supermodels, unveiled their own T-shirts as part of a
fashion-forward campaign heralded by a chirping anchor woman, just
after anthrax updates, intended to â€œget you spending
again.â€? Designers such as Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan and Tommy
Hilfiger lent their pseudo-celebrity to the presentation of the Ts
in New York's Bryant Park, kicking off a campaign by the Council of
Fashion Designers of America (CDFA) and Vogue.

New York City's mayor, Rudy Giuliani, joined them at the podium
to add his own mantra: â€œShopping is important. Do
it!â€?

We understand that the nation is â€œat war.â€?
Ominously, it is a war that threatens Americans where they live
more profoundly than any conflict since the Civil War. Past the
incomprehensible horror of the World Trade Center attack, a chorus
of media wags have attempted to convince us that in spite of
unyieldingly frightening economics swirling, it is our rote and
patriotic duty to spend money to, somehow, fight the terror. Less
clearly spelled out in red, white and blue is where the money will
come from.

The much-parroted conventional wisdom invokes Capitalism 101:
Consumer purchases account for about two-thirds of the U.S.
economy; when consumers purchase at a steady and preferably
incremental pace, stores empty out and order more stuff, bolstering
their stock values; that fuels the assembly lines of vendors who
ship the stuff to the stores, bolstering their stock values; ergo,
buying stuff bolsters the lot of the American markets, the heart of
which psychos bombed on Sept. 11. Consumption becomes not just
defiance, but a counteroffensive.

In spite of all real indicators prior to Sept. 11, the pundits
reassured consumers that everything was OK. A week and a half
later, Greenspan went so far as to tell the Congress that the U.S.,
in the weeks preceding the attacks, had been showing signs of
recovery, contradicting a â€œbeige bookâ€? report issued by
none other than the Federal Reserve.

Now, as the holidays approach, we can expect to see many
splendid permutations of the CDFA/Vogue â€œFashion for
Americaâ€? effort. The designer group's initiative will involve
an ad campaign featuring the likes of comely actress Julianne Moore
and model Gisele Budnchen, and appearances by the designers
themselves, whose names appear on the back of the special edition
T-shirts, at some of the 400 department stores that will carry the
Ts. Nobly, the proceeds are supposed to go to the Twin Towers
Fund.

â€œThe best way to help is to heed the mayor's request about
getting out to shop, and act as if we are living on Sept.
10,â€? Tommy Hilfiger told the media gathering in Bryant Park.
In logical terms, however, things bog down there.

In spite of Hilfiger's undoubtedly luxe life, in spite of
Greenspan's cut in the prime lending rate, in spite of the tax
refund checks issued in August as evidence of Bush largess, a
recession had roosted well before Sept. 11.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in the first six
months of the year, companies laid off a total of 712,488
employees, up from 513,254 during the first half of 2000. Add that
to the nearly 900,000 layoffs since Sept. 11, and you've got more
than 1.5 million U.S. households separated from their income
â€” or a substantial chunk of it, in relatively abrupt
fashion.

Indeed, as late as Sept. 10, the Christian Science
Monitor reported that in the second quarter of 2001: U.S.
commercial banks wrote off $2.8 billion in credit card debt, up
nearly 27 percent from the second quarter of 2001, per the Federal
Deposit Insurance Corp; that Americans were paying 4.63 percent of
mortgage payments more than 30 days overdue, up from 4.37 percent
in the first quarter, per the Mortgage Bankers Association of
America, and that Americans filed a record 400,394 bankruptcies, up
24.5 percent from the previous year, according to the American
Bankruptcy Institute.

Right now, only 27 percent of Americans consider it a
â€œgood time to buyâ€? items they want and need, according
to a Roper Reports consumer confidence survey of 1,000 adults age
18 and over, conducted in mid-October, up from 22 percent from the
week after the attack. Looking toward the holidays, Roper asked
consumers what would â€œget them out to shop at stores,â€?
and found the No. 1 response to be â€œdiscounts and sales and
services of productsâ€? (63 percent), versus 42 percent who
cited â€œpromoting U.S.-made productsâ€? and 34 percent who
said they would be influenced by percentages of sales going to
â€œrelief efforts.â€? This suggests that people are
hunkering down, and that's quite understandable, says Jon Berry,
Roper vice president. â€œEntering bankruptcy in the name of
patriotism is not exactly an act of honor,â€? he says. (For
more on confidence surveys, see Pulse, page 22.)

Some 26 percent of Americans plan to spend less on purchasing
gifts this year, â€œa sizable chunk,â€? Berry says,
â€œespecially when you consider that that camp includes some
pretty important segments. Thirty-three percent of women plan to
spend less, and 30 percent of 45- to 59-year-olds plan to spend
less.â€? Even among the less recession-wary, the
$75,000-household-income category, 1 in 5 plan to spend less.

On Oct. 21, The New York Times even reported that, from a
rough poll of credit-issued bank execs, Americans in recent months
had begun curtailing credit card use for the first time in nearly a
decade, beginning before Sept. 11 and slowing further
thereafter.

Logic strains even more when one charges such a consumer base
with emptying America's stores. As columnist Alexander Cockburn has
pointed out, speciality and mass retailers not only virtually
repaved suburbia in the past decade into gleaming, multi-brand
strips, but built up their empires on soft ground.

â€œThere are too many stores, and there have been for a long
time,â€? affirms Wendy Liebmann, president of WSL Strategic
Retail, a New York-based consulting firm. Compounding that, early
research on a 2002 â€œHow American Shopsâ€? report by WSL
indicates that the big-brand retail glut has manifested in such a
homogenous storescape that consumers are nearing a sort of critical
mass on must-haves.

â€œIt seems like, for six years, all we've done is buy a
litany of stuff, from cars to computers to DVDs,â€? says
Liebmann. â€œEven without any recession jitters, people don't
really have a compelling need to run out and buy something. â€¦
In the short term, people might feel a bit better once they buy
their sweater with a flag, or T-shirt with flag, or a flag, but
that will not solve these fundamental retailing and marketing
issues that have been looming for a long time.â€?

It's eerie to find ourselves called, as dutiful citizens, to
live beyond our means. War footings past have prompted leaders to
ask material sacrifices of We the People. But, as former labor
secretary Robert Reich pointed out in his Sept. 23 syndicated
column, this newly conceived â€œmarket patriotism suggests a
strange kind of sacrifice: Continue the binge we've been on for
years. â€¦ The reality is that Americans are in no position to
do what's being asked of them.â€?

It is a â€œNew Warâ€? indeed, when they also serve who
get out and shop.